Eli Manning is a MAN. He eats lightning and craps thunder. Talk about stepping up... Any athlete that can do what he did in the face of the press and fans ragging him the way they did is just tremendous in my book.
I haven't really watched football all season. The game against the Packers was the first one I saw, and then the Super Bowl. To be truthful, I'm not a big NFL fan, but I will hang out and watch games if invited to someone's house. I'll even make food. To me, it's more about getting together than it is about being a fan of any particular team. If the Giants had lost last night, it's not like I would have been as crushing as, say, the Yankees losing the World Series. I was just happy to see a great, competitive game with some terrific strategic moves and great plays. I don't know how David Tyree managed that catch after Eli nearly got sacked. That Eli stayed up, and that the ball somehow magically stuck to Tyree's helmet long enough for him to get two hands on it, is nothing short of a miracle.

As we all know, though, there's so much more to the Super Bowl than the game.

As an advertising writer, I want to say a couple things about the commercials. They sucked. This year was the first year I remember commercials truly being unremarkable. The best one might have been the Coke commercial with the Charlie Brown, Stewie and Underdog balloons. And I still wondered what the point was after it was over. The Bud Light commercials featuring super powers were just dumb. Audi's take on the Godfather horse head scene was dumb. GoDaddy driving people to the web, where everybody has instant access to free porn, in order to see a racy commercial featuring Danica Patrick was dumb. Just about the only commercial that was intriguing to me was the Hyundai Genesis commercial. And that's just because of my own morbid curiosity about whether or not Korean engineers have solved the challenge of how to keep a 300+ HP car made of tin from exploding on contact.

The halftime show wasn't going to give Lewis Black any more fodder for comedy routines. I'm a Tom Petty fan, and I found that halftime show to be simply boring. No surprises, just the four abbreviated tunes that everyone expected. I figured they could have at least had Tom joined on stage by someone interesting. But I guess "interesting" isn't what the producers are going for in the post-Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction age.